The entire world’s media attention was drawn to Boulder Colorado and the Christmas 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsay, the precocious six year-old daughter of a wealthy businessman who was murdered inside her home. The case was initiated when the parents called the police reporting their daughter’s abduction, based on a two-and-half-page ransom note supposedly left behind by the kidnappers. Hours later, in a search of the residence, JonBenet was found dead in a small room in the basement. An autopsy revealed she had a skull fracture and suffered ligature strangulation. The affluence of the parents, the strange nature of the crime, and her participation in many child beauty pageants, which were documented by hundreds of photographs and videos of her, fueled the media interest in this story. When she was found, she also had a ligature around her wrist as if she had been tied up sometime during the incident. America was soon divided into two camps; one believing the parents were involved and the other believing someone else entered the house and murdered JonBenet while her parents and her brother were asleep. When considering the below listed factors, this crime is consistent with a staged event. As in the Sam Sheppard case earlier, the exact motive for the murder is still not clear and leaves many questions unanswered.
• If this was a kidnapping, then why leave the body behind to be found?
• Wouldn’t killing their victim eliminate any chance to recover the ransom?
• If the motive was sexual assault, then why was there no evidence of a sexual assault present on her body or at the scene?
• Perhaps the biggest question of all is why leave the hand written note behind since it only served to provide the police their only real forensic evidence?
• Moreover, why leave the note if no kidnapping took place and the victim is left behind deceased in the residence?
In this case, we see some of the same findings as in the Sam Sheppard and Jeffrey MacDonald cases, where we have an offender who was so clever, they managed to enter the victim’s house undetected and left without leaving any signs of their presence. In this case, the offender also had enough knowledge of the house to find his way up a flight of stairs to JonBenet’s second-floor bedroom, was able to remove her from her bed without causing her to wake up or prevented her from calling out, and ultimately move her down two flights of stairs into the basement. At some time after she was removed from her bedroom, she ate some pineapple (pineapple was found in her stomach at autopsy and her parents denied giving her any). Sometime later, she suffered blunt force trauma to her head, fracturing her skull and was then strangled using two different ligatures; the material of which both came from within the house. She was then wrapped up in a blanket and placed into another basement room. At some time during the incident, the offender also had to write the two-and-half-page ransom note and leave it on the stairs where it was found. But, this same clever offender was so unprepared and the crime so unplanned that everything used in the commission of the crime originated from the
scene. The hand-written note was written from a pen that was recovered by police inside the kitchen and the paper came from a writing tablet that was also in the kitchen area. It was also unlike any ransom note the FBI had ever seen. Normally, a ransom note is very short and to the point. The
note left behind by the suspect was almost a manifesto. Lastly, but normally an initial consideration during an investigation, is, exactly what was the motive behind the entire incident? Sexual assault? Kidnapping? Even today, the exact motive behind the entire incident is still unclear, but the only real crime that was committed was JonBenet’s murder.
